Help for Trauma

Inspiration

Dr. Linda Gantt and the late Dr. Louis Tinnin, pioneers of Trauma Therapy have written several books and established the ITR Training Institute where they teach and train therapists on how to use the ITR Method to treat trauma. They have hundreds of testimonials from clients and success in hospitals and clinics. Dr. Tinnin believed that someday people will be able to do the ITR Method without the assistance of a therapist. With AI and retrieval augmented generation, we make that possible by transcribing hundreds of hours of training videos along with materials and fine-tuning.

What it does

A user creates an account and takes an assessment to ensure they are qualified to start on their own. Once in, they learn about grounding exercises and create a Safe Place drawing. From there, they create a learn about True Self and Parts Map and complete the exercises creating them. Once completed, they begin telling their trauma stories, also known as a Graphic Narrative where they give the trauma an end. This method helps bring closure and an end to each trauma.

How we built it

We built this web app with Next.js, on Vercel's platform. We utilized open-source tools from Excalidraw. The Vercel AI SDK was utilized to incorporate the RAG system and incorporated OpenAI's APIs to transcribe hours of video.

Challenges we ran into

The development was pretty seamless, however, we ran into some UI challenges when working with the different libraries and conflicting codebase. Thankfully Claud.ai and ChatGPT helped us overcome every challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I know personally the effects of Trauma. I KNOW this tool will be effective in treating the root. Dr. Tinnin passed away in 2014 and I'm proud that his vision of DIY trauma therapy is finally realized.

What we learned

We initially thought to simply incorporate ChatGPT or another LLM, but found it could give answers that are NOT in alignment with what the ITR Method teaches. We also learned that RAG is great if you ask the question in the right way. We have to do a lot of fine-tuning and monitoring of the questions asked to enhance the user experience.

What's next for Help for Trauma

We plan to incorporate LLama 3.2, continue with fine tuning, build an admin panel and many UX/UI enhancements. We will be soliciting feedback from users and work to start research with universities.